#16 The Vegetarian Myth with Lierre Keith

Lierre Keith speaks to me this week about the dangers of the vegetarian and vegan diets. Many have been led astray by the vegan movement that these diets will prevent disease and save the planet. Lierre eloquently exposes these myths. The results of this diet are quite the opposite. 

Transcript

Click here to view the full transcript for #16 The Vegetarian Myth with Lierre Keith.
Her book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.”

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability

The Vegetarian Myth Lierre Keith

We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. But, is it true?

Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray—not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil—the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.

Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

Lierre’s New Book

Deep Green ResistanceDeep Green Resistance starts where the environmental movement leaves off: industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can’t fix it, and shopping—no matter how green—won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play. Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.

About Lierre

Lierre KeithLierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. She lives in northern California.

Lierre is the author of the novels Conditions of War and Skyler Gabriel. She is coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (Seven Stories Press, 2011) and she’s the editor of The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution (Seven Stories Press, 2012). She’s also been arrested six times.

Works

 

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Find Lierre

LierreKeith.com

in Diet/Nutrition/Podcast

Dr Wendy Myers, ND is a detox expert, functional diagnostic nutritionist, NES Bioenergetic Practitioner, and founder of Myersdetox.com. She is the #1 bestselling author of Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals to End Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue . Additionally, Wendy is the host of The Heavy Metals Summit, the Myers Detox Podcast, and the Supercharged Podcast. Passionate about the importance of detox to live a long and healthy life, she created the revolutionary Myers Detox Protocol , and Mitochondria Detox kit after working with thousands of clients, as well as a range of supplements to help you detox from everyday living and maintain a healthy lifestyle!

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Wendy Myers
9 years ago

Sorry, I don’t buy the vegan BS rhetoric. You’re wasting your breathe on a PALEO website. I was just as fervent and rabid as you are about voicing the ills of animal consumption when I was vegan. Until I became ill and unable to think in a short matter of months. It kinda snapped me out of my vegan haze and back into reality – that humans have eaten meat for millions of years and thus our bodies are designed to function physiologically on MEAT. If you want to destroy your health to save a cow, that is your god given right. But I frankly don’t want to hear about it. It bores me to tears. Been there done that. I read all the vegan and vegetarian books. Don’t buy it.

Ron Hollis
Ron Hollis
9 years ago
Reply to  Wendy Myers

Wendy, here is what seems to be a similar case to your difficulty with thyroid and her solution. It might be interesting to you.

… from Janine Atkinson – September 2011:

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease where antibodies damage the thyroid cells, interfering with their ability to make thyroid hormones. The parathyroid and the thyroid gland swell up to an abnormal size, having many lumps and nodules within the glands. In my case, it was also sticking to my surrounding vocal chords.After my initial diagnosis I soon developed other, worse symptoms, ranging from depression, fatigue, cold hands and feet, shaking muscles and hands, INABILITY TO FOCUS AND THINK, hypoglycemia, weight fluctuation, painful periods, and symptoms resembling irritable bowel syndrome. I was told I would be infertile, my symptoms would never go away, and that I would be lucky to live a fulfilled life.

http://www.kushiinstitute.org/question/hashimotos-disease/

lauren
lauren
8 years ago
Reply to  Wendy Myers

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-problem-with-the-paleo-diet-argument/

you should think about before a million year ago…. you don’t buy it because you like meat. If you were open minded you would actually continue to accept information from both sides.

iodine is key in a functional thyroid. anyway, you’re reply to this guy is so rude you’re definitely not going to live until 110. Kind people are going to far surpass your life span.

Ron Hollis
Ron Hollis
9 years ago

Animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, water pollution, ocean dead zones and habitat destruction.
Animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all worldwide transportation combined — cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes. Livestock and their waste and flatulence account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock causes 65% of all emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops grown for livestock feed consume 56% of the water used in the United States.

80% of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals, and most of this soy is grown on cleared lands that were once rain forests. All this is taking place as an estimated million children across the planet die each year from starvation and as hunger and malnutrition affect an additional 1 billion people. In the United States 70% of the grain we grow goes to feed livestock raised for consumption.

The natural resources used to produce even minimal amounts of animal products are staggering — 1,000 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of milk. Add to this the massive clear cutting and other destruction of forests, especially in the Amazon — where forest destruction has risen to 91% and we find ourselves lethally despoiling the lungs of the earth largely for the benefit of the animal agriculture industry. Our forests, especially our rain forests, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and exchange it for oxygen: Killing the forests is a death sentence for the planet. Land devoted exclusively to raising livestock now represents 45% of the earth’s land mass.
As for the marketing of grass-fed animals on small farms — while it initially appears better, it is actually worse. The factory farming is horrific for the animals, but it is better for the environment than pasture-fed beef because of methane emissions, feces excretion and all the horses and wolves that are killed so cattle can graze on public land, which we pay for with our public dollars.

http://www.opednews.com/populum/pagem.php?f=Saving-the-Planet-One-Mea-by-Chris-Hedges-Animals_Food_Health_Pollution-141110-231.html